The Solution Focused Brief Therapy Diamond: A New Approach To SFBT That Will Empower Both Practitioner and Client To Achieve Best Outcomes

by Elliott Connie and Dr Adam Froerer (Hay House, 2023)

Reviewed by Martin Buckley

This book is a solution-focused best-seller, and most SF-ers have heard of it even if they haven’t read it.  If you are one of those who hasn’t — should you?

As a new SF recruit, I am hesitant to review the Diamond, but having read it several times over 18 months, I do feel able at least to present it to those who haven’t.

The book claims to be a highly innovative new approach to structuring a solution-focused therapy session. It suggests that influential SF practitioners order their sessions in different ways and proposes a flexible (diamond-shaped) format that accommodates all potential session structures. It does advance a short analysis of the way the London BRIEF practitioners work that may not precisely accord with (they told our class) their own views. Nor does the diamond model mirror the accreditation criteria of the UKASFP, so its insights will need to incorporated in a personal or ad hoc fashion by anyone seeking to adhere to the UKASFP structure. And of course, other session-structure models do exist — e.g. the “gallery”.

All this notwithstanding, I agree with the authors’ claim that the diamond helps clarify questions of where in a session different elements — e.g. resources, instances, preferred future, scales — can go; wherever makes sense, and is most helpful to the client, is their pragmatic view. I found particularly useful chapters 10-18, which unpack the model.

Elliott Connie obviously has huge experience as a therapist, and Dr Adam Froerer is a major researcher into how SF works.  The book is a sincere, indeed passionate, presentation of the approach, with many enriching personal insights. It is quite short, and written in an approachable, often informal style, with Connie’s contributions being chattier and Froerer’s slightly more formal and research-related. It’s also an unapologetic bromance — the frank and honest revelations of how these men met, have supported each other through many trials, and the trust they share, is unusual in a book of this kind, and very moving. Their emphasis on religion, and the centrality of love in SF, will not be congenial to everyone — after all, even the question of empathy is debated within SF...   And I personally am not grammatically at ease with phrases like “future of the outcome;” but I suppose such phrases enter the language, work conceptually, and that’s what matters.

If the book’s core message is that the diamond can liberate the therapist, it should be stressed that it also contains the accumulated wisdom of many therapy sessions, including revealing case studies. I now see The Solution Focused Brief Therapy Diamond less as a primer for those taking up SFBT, than an invigorating read for any SFBT practitioner.